What Is The Best SEO Tool? – It’s Amazingly Free!

What is the best SEO tool? It’s a question that frequently rears it’s head among the online community I belong to. It’s also a question most often posed by newcomers. Most seasoned entrepreneurs seem to have found an SEO tool or plugin that works well for them.

The purpose of the SEO tool is to guide your website posting. Pages also rank, so include them as well! Either way it’s common knowledge that Google has more than a couple criteria when it comes to ranking. It’s important to become familiar with what the big G wants if you want your posts to rank. We all want our posts to rank, and rank high!

What Is The Best SEO Tool And Why Is It Important To Have?

When working with a wordpress theme, the SEO tool most preferred is called a plugin. There are different SEO plugins, though only a few of them are considered to be the best. I can’t argue with anyone else’s idea of which SEO plugin works best. If the plugin you use is getting positive results, it sure looks like the best to me.

That being said, I do have my own favorite SEO plugin and I swear to all that is good and true that it is the best. It’s also free. When a fellow community member asks “What is the best SEO tool?”, I tell them what I believe and to install Yoast!

Facts About Yoast That Make Me Believe It’s The Best SEO Tool

Yoast like other popular SEO plugins does its job to ensure your posts, articles, blogs, or pages are well suited for high rankings in the Google and other search engines. They do this by using a variety of different means and here is where I think Yoast jumps above the rest.

Yoast has a very structured system, a kind of checklist if you will that defines every point of SEO criteria assumed to be relevant to search engines! I say assumed because no one really knows the algorithm. Yoast uses all the accepted criteria that has been suggested by many hours of internet research.

Inside The Yoast System

What is the best SEO tool? The cry goes out again! It’s Yoast I tell you! i don’t really like to be told and I bet you don’t either, so maybe it’s better if I just show you. I’ll explain how Yoast works with some images to boot so you can see exactly what I mean.

Let’s Inspect This Image Starting At The Top!

You can see at the very top it gives me the word count, date, and time that I saved the draft. Below that is Yoast SEO and an arrow over on the right that simply opens and closes the menu. Next you have Help center in purple, also with an arrow. Use the arrow to open up the Yoast support center.

Next Comes The Meat And Potatoes Of Yoast!

Continuing to the next line down you see a traffic light on the left followed by readability. Keyword and a + box end the line. The traffic light is the Yoast way of clearing your post for publishing. It’s always red to start. It turns orange as you complete requirements, and finally green when ready to show the world!

It’s barely visible in the image, but I have Keyword selected and the SEO requirements drop down below it. If I were to select Readability a whole different list of requirements will drop down. I’ll show that next! The + inside the box is a premium feature (yes you can buy Yoast premium though the free version is great). It allows you to target multiple keywords within one post.

Underneath the traffic light you see a share icon and a tool icon. The share icon opens a new screen that allows you to manipulate the way you’d like the post to appear when shared on Facebook or Twitter! You can
set a new title or any image you want to appear along with the shared post. The tool icon also opens a screen that allows instructions to bots that crawl the post.

Back To The Main Image!

Next in line is the Snippet Editor. The Snippet is the part of the post that will be seen in the search engine! There’s a lot of important info to be conveyed in this small space, and you can direct all of it.

Below that you see the box where you enter your keyword. Finally you come to several SEO criteria that must be passed using the traffic light system in order for your post to qualify for good rankings! You can see I took the screenshot before I placed the first image in the post. The light is still red.

A Look At Readability

It seems I’m a passive writer which Yoast doesn’t recommend. There are reasons to break this rule and you can see that my overall result is still green. Each rule also provides a link to research the subject in more detail if you’re having trouble understanding what Yoast is asking for!

Inspecting The Yoast Sidebar

Publish

The publish section holds the trigger button. Once you publish a post it can’t be taken back. Make sure you’re ready first! In this tab you can also save the draft and preview the post. Finally you have pertinent info like the post status (published or not), revisions, visibility, and your yoast publishing recommendation.

Format

Here Yoast gives the user several different formatting options. Each can be quite helpful if you’re writing a certain kind of article. An image only post would be best if switched over to that kind of formatting.

Categories, Tags, And Featured Image

Categories is a way to organize your website’s posts and pages within your SEO. Tags can also be added to your post which appear as archive listings in search engines. They are common terms that are frequently used in your post.

Lasty, choose a featured image to represent the post. That image will appear on Facebook and other social sites unless you direct it to do otherwise. It will also appear underneath your header, and directly above the post title.

Free VS Premium Features

I’ll tell you right now that the free version of Yoast works wonders for my SEO. More than that, it has such a structured format that after using it a few times I really learned how to write for SEO without it.

This has given me the ability to write for others using any kind of word format they desire. I still like to use Yoast, but I no longer need it to know how to write an SEO optimized article!

For Those That Are Interested In The Paid Version, Here Are The Additions You’ll Get:

Redirect Manager – An onsite manager that allows you to redirect any url. Link Yoast with google search console to make the process flawless. Fix common redirect errors here as well.

Multiple Focus Keywords – This features makes it possible to rank for two keywords. They can be like keywords, or completely different depending on how you want to go about it. That’s a powerful feature indeed!

Social Previews – Yoast gives you a snapshot of what your Facebook or Twitter post will look like with this feature.

Premium Support – Paying for premium Yoast also gives you access to their support team. Access is available through email, and can be used for any question or issue that might arise.

You are also more than welcome to jump over to the Yoast website and see a list and description of all free and premium features. There are many more free features that mostly allow you to tweak the yoast settings from the inside. These are all explained if you follow the above link.

What Is The Best SEO Tool For The First Timer Building A Website?

Alright, so what is the best SEO tool for the newbie? Let’s go over a couple things first. Although Yoast SEO and other popular SEO plugins are free, building and maintaining a website most surely isn’t. Not if you want any real results.

So before you worry too much about SEO get the facts about website building and the various platforms available to help you do it. If you’re interested in establishing your very own business in the field of affiliate marketing, I highly recommend reading my Wealthy Affiliate review.

Wealthy Affiliate can also be used as an extremely affordable means to build up to 25 websites at incredibly affordable monthly rate. It doesn’t have to be for affiliate marketing. If this is not the route for you, I completely understand. Check out any of my reviews or articles on hosting, themes, domain names, or other options for learning affiliate marketing.

Once you have your website up and running, you can go with which ever SEO plugin you prefer. The All In One SEO plugin is a favorite among new site builders, but I still suggest Yoast. I think it teaches you better.

What Is The Best SEO Tool? – In Conclusion

What is the best SEO tool? I think it’s now more than clear where my opinion on the subject lands. I’ve heard fellow Wealthy Affiliate members claim they don’t like it, and I can get that the structure is too much for some.

It feels to them like it’s limiting creativity, but to me a solid SEO structure is important. I try to fill in the creativity inside of that structure. I do hope this article has given you a helpful understanding of why SEO tool are so important, and what you might expect when using a free version.

Any feedback from you on prior experience with SEO tools, Yoast, or any other specific tool will greatly add to the value of this article. I always get back to every comment. Thanks for reading, sharing, liking, and following. Until next time.

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